Q&A: Ken Levine’s Brave New World of BioShock Infinite

Ken Levine.Photo: Irrational Games

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Considering the subject matter of his next game, it makes sense to interview Ken Levine in our nation’s capital.

Levine’s games take clear inspiration from American society and politics. BioShock, released in 2007, explored Ayn Rand and Objectivism using the setting of a dystopian underwater city. In BioShock Infinite, to be released in October, Levine pulls inspiration from the very beginning of the 20th century. Set in a floating city called Columbia, Infinite will involve themes of theocracy and American exceptionalism.

Game|Life editor Chris Kohler and I spoke with Levine last month during the Art of Video Games exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where the original BioShock was on display.

Wired: Your games have always had claustrophobic, oppressive and menacing atmospheres. How do you preserve that in an environment like BioShock Infinite where it’s set mostly outside with blue skies overhead?

Ken Levine: What we’ve shown so far is primarily what’s different about the game. We’re basically expanding the palette instead of changing it. So the [areas] we’ve shown are much more [open]. In the E3 demo, it starts in a dark, little store with lots of little things to loot around. It’s a spooky environment. And there’s going to be a ton of that in this game.

I think people know we can do the dark, gloomy, oppressive spaces, so the question was, “How can we expand the palette to include these big spaces? And what does expanding that palette mean for the game?” I think we’ve been trying to show that. We only have a limited time to put stuff in front of people and we want to make sure we show things that would tell them what’s the same, but also what’s different.

I think you’ll realize, as you start seeing more of the game, that there’s going to be more of those [dark] environments.

In BioShock, we did a certain range of stuff extremely well. But it was basically a dungeon crawler dressed up as an underwater city. And I think people felt we never really delivered upon being at the bottom of the ocean in the way that maybe they would have wanted.

But in Infinite, we wanted to make sure that we delivered upon the verticality. There’s the skylines, the zeppelin and then you’ll see a lot more stuff coming up soon. We’re just really leveraging the sky and the outdoors, as well as having all the other tools that we had before.

Wired: Can you expand on some of that?

Levine: This is going to sound evasive, but generally, as a developer, I like to show stuff right before I talk about it, because otherwise it comes off as a little abstract. But I think people are going to be surprised at just how much of the sky space is leveraged.

You’ve seen the skylines, obviously, but there’s other stuff coming along. There’s one, which is really a big part of the game: We have a piece of tech now that allows everything from a zeppelin to an entire city block to move freely in the sky. I think people will be surprised at how much of that there is.

Wired: I saw the press releases about the new enemies but I haven’t had a chance to look at any videos. Can you tell us a little bit about these guys –- the Heavy Hitters?

Levine: The two we’ve shown so far are sort of like big bad bruiser types. There’s the Handyman, who has these huge, porcelain hands. He can jump huge distances and pick up objects, including enemies, and use them as a weapon or even toss them at the player. That was the first enemy we showed.

And one trademark of BioShock games is that we always have a lot of space for telling a story outside of the main arc. For example, the story of the Big Daddies and Little Sisters from the first game. You learn all these little details about the Handyman and how they came to be and players are going to find a lot of that stuff to be really surprising.

Wired: Are you delivering these nuggets of information the same way you did in the previous games, such as the audio logs and environmental clues?

Levine: That’s exactly right. You have all these layers of storytelling in BioShock games. In Infinite you have the main story involving Elizabeth and Booker. The new layers, the ones that are really in your face, are the characters. You interact with them and they’re not dead or behind a piece of glass, as was often the case in BioShock.

We want to support the kind of gamer who wants to be like, “Oh, God damn, what do I do here?” when presented with a tough decision.

We’re still going to support the traditional forms that I think are really useful for giving those detailed backstories. I was talking about music before in another interview, and the style of music along with how it came to be is going to be another story you have to follow. The story of the Handyman is another one. Both of those will be delivered through audio logs and little visual pieces in the environment.

The new character we showed last week was called the Motorized Patriot, who is this Hall of Presidents-esque figure. So imagine an automaton George Washington, who was originally used for propaganda in the city. He acted sort of as a museum guide, telling the history of the city.

And when things got ugly, the city residents weaponized him and gave him this big, heavy machine gun (laughs). So he’s spouting his propaganda but he’s also a deadly Terminator figure. I think, aesthetically, he’s really cool. He’s an enemy that’s just really relentless, and when you do kill him — well, you can even hack him and take control of him — you can take his machine gun, which is called The Peppermill. And the only way you can get that gun is by killing him.

Levine: Yeah, one thing we heard about BioShock is that there were things some people missed from our older games like System Shock. Like making a choice and being stuck with it. For some gamers that isn’t good, like “Oh I don’t want to be stuck.” But others find it really important that they have to think about their decisions.

The other thing is specialization. You have to think to yourself and say “I want to be a vigorous guy,” or “I’m going to be a sniper guy,” or whatever you choose to be. That means if you’re not specialized and you pick up a pistol, you’re going to have a real challenge with it.

And you’ll have times where you struggle because you don’t have ammo for the weapon you’re comfortable with and have all these stats to support.

I find those experiences really fun. I’ve played so many Civilization or X-COM games where I’m really behind the eight ball and I have to come from behind. So I think that’s great and it’s something that I think wasn’t strongly represented in the first BioShock.

Wired: Does the game place any larger focus on these elements outside of “1999 Mode”?

Levine: The “normal mode” does contain choices you have to live with permanently. But the thing with 1999 Mode, in terms of specialization at least, is that it’s mainly a balance issue. For instance, you could basically make the starting point for everybody with all the tools much lower. If you don’t enhance that, especially as the difficulty curve rises, you’re going to get further behind the eight ball. That’s an issue of balancing the numbers.

It creates a very different style of gameplay. A lot of gamers might not understand — well, okay, a lot of gamers probably understand now because they play so many multiplayer games and they see these balance changes with things getting made worse or made better and they see the impact that has on the game.

Balance is one of the most important things we do, and it’s not very glamorous. You sit there with a spreadsheet. But you have to know where your attention should be and in the first BioShock, our attention was focused on making a game people could get through.

We want to do that in Infinite, but we also want to support the kind of gamer who wants to be like, “Oh, God damn, what do I do here?” when presented with a tough decision. That’s a bit of an old-school notion though, which is why we call it 1999 Mode. But it’s a valid notion.

To some degree, my dream would be that a lot of people who don’t come from that kind of background play this mode and are like, “Wait, I’ve never played something like this where I’m forced to make these hard decisions.” And they’re reloading their save and they really get stuck on an area and fight and fight it and finally beat it.

So many of my greatest gaming experiences come from that kind of thing.

Wired: It sounds like you’re making two different games when you talk about these two modes. The balancing of both of them has got to really increase the amount of work you’re doing.

Levine: Yeah, and balance makes a very broad impact. Look at the original Rainbow Six games compared to the current ones. In those games, you take one shot and you’re dead, which creates a certain amount of tension. Now you could go and balance that and have a very different game just by changing the underlying numbers. You could take more damage, have the enemies react more sluggishly –- you can do a lot of things that are relatively simple to implement but very hard to get right.

Anybody can go in an say we’re going to make this game harder. But you really need an expert who actually knows what that means and knows how you get those results with the numbers. Same way with BioShock, I said I wanted people to get through this. Dorian, our numbers balancing guy, had figure out how to achieve that.

With Infinite, I said, I want that but I also want to have my cake and eat it too. So players can get through the game in a relatively straightforward fashion, but 1999 Mode drastically changes how you think about specializing your skills. That has huge knock-on effects throughout the game. If you’re specialized, finding ammo for a gun that isn’t your specialty and not finding ammo for that same gun has a huge impact on how you approach combat. Just that alone. You have no ammo for your gun that deals three times the damage relative to the gun you can use that only deals half your normal damage.

That’s a style of spreadsheet game design that a lot of people don’t see very much.

The Motorized Patriot is a cross between George Washington and the Terminator.Image: Irrational Games

Wired: Your big appearance at last E3 was on Sony’s stage. I think a lot of people were wondering what to think about the PlayStation Vita and you, very generously, gave Sony a lot of your credibility that you’ve built up based on System Shock and BioShock. I can’t think of other people on your tier who could walk out onto that stage and say “I’m making a game, I have nothing to show you, but trust me.”

Were you nervous about going up and announcing that without anything to show?

Levine: Yeah, absolutely. Look, Sony has been –- and I’m not just giving you bullshit here -– a great, great partner to us. You’re going to see some stuff coming up that illustrates that. You know, they just sent me a Vita with a bunch of games, and that’s a tiny thing, but there are so many huge things. They’re very nice to us.

So when they asked me to get on stage, I was a little nervous because as I said, I don’t like to go out and just talk. I want to show you something first and then talk about it because it is tough to speak abstractly about things. I don’t want to convince you, I’d much rather have the work convince you.

When they asked me to do that and at first I was like, “Well, I don’t really have a lot to talk about and the last thing I want to do is go out and make a bunch of promises.” I tried to really downplay what I was presenting, which is tough on a stage where presenters are going out and saying “We’re gonna do this!”

But that’s just not my personality. I tried to manage people’s expectations of what the Vita game is going to be. Not because I think they’re going to be bad but because I’d rather not talk like a marketing person. I’d rather say, “Here’s the basic thing we’re doing and maybe you’ll check it out!”

You shouldn’t be complaining about developers hyping their work, because you should just not listen to them.

I think that’s what’s always so interesting about the game space. I think a lot of people worry about games being overhyped. Look, frankly, if you’re going to believe me about BioShock Infinite over your friends and reviewers, you’re probably doing yourself a disservice.

It is my baby, right? I am not an objective judge of it or anything we do. I’m going to go out and talk about the game and I’m going to tell you what I honestly think about it. And generally, if I wasn’t excited about it, then I’m making a mistake in the development process. Because then, why don’t I go back and do something I’ll be excited about?

I always say, look, don’t believe the hype. Listen to you guys, or listen to your buddies or go on the internet when a game comes out. But you shouldn’t be complaining about developers hyping their work, because you should just not listen to them. That’s their job, is to hype it.

I’m fortunate that I get to hype things I really believe in, I don’t have to go out and hype stuff I don’t believe in. And when I’m not ready to hype it, I just don’t talk much about it and that’s why when people ask me about the Vita game, I just say I’m not ready to talk about it because I don’t have anything to show yet.

Wired: Are you really focusing on BioShock Infinite before you get to work on the Vita game? Or are you working on both simultaneously?

Levine: These games really are all-consuming endeavors. You do want to keep the ball rolling but it is tough to give it your full attention before you finish what you have. But we’re getting there with Infinite.

Wired: Well, you just announced a release date.

Levine: Yes! October 16! Which is great, because now we have an end date and we can know when it’s time to put pencils down. You can keep going forever, honestly. I could work on this game for another 20 years and keep polishing it and making it better. But at some point –- and this wasn’t decided by our publisher, this was my decision –- you need to say “this is the date.” It helps keep the team focused on finishing it, knowing they have a constraint. I always think you work the hardest when you have constraints because that sort of helps you define your task.

So yeah, we’re not as focused on the Vita game as we will be.

Wired: I love the Will The Circle Be Unbroken trailer because it brought to mind the Gears of War trailers where they played “Mad World.” But of course that had nothing to do with the actual aesthetic of Gears of War. When I saw your trailer, I felt that it fit together so well. I expect music like that or emotions like that will be present in the actual game, right?

Levine: Yeah, the level you got a peek at there was basically this company town and we’ll be showing more of that later. The guys in this town are pretty oppressed. This is where the roots of the Vox Populi come from and where the social upheaval comes from. The reason that happens is because people are pretty unhappy and having folk music and hymns like that creates a much more somber mood.

There’s also the fact that the woman playing Elizabeth just has this incredible voice. One of the best days of my life was when the guy playing Booker played his guitar and she starts singing. They sat together and made this beautiful moment.

I really struggled with what song was going to be in the trailer. I found that song, which is well-known from the Carter Family version, but this was the original hymn, which doesn’t have the word “Lord” in it. It was a weird conversation because it’s obviously a religious song. I mean it’s about people dying and going to heaven. It’s a sad song and the notion that we somehow sanitize it is pretty hysterical. Songs get changed all the time.

It’s a beautiful song that’s been done in a lot of different styles over time. What we settled on was this very simple style that I thought suited her and the character. It’s not often you to get to participate on something like that.

Levine: I asked Courtnee [Draper, who portrays Elizabeth] if she could sing, and I had this idea that there would be some singing in the game because music is always important to Bioshock games. She gives me a tape of something she wrote and I listen to it and go, “Oh my God.”

The recordings she gave me were actually fairly polished and professional, very Broadway-style. When we got to the studio, I asked if we could try something a lot simpler and stripped down. She agreed and when she started singing, she just had perfect pitch, incredible delivery and Troy [Baker, who plays Booker] played a beautiful guitar. It was a great moment. I just got so lucky.

I had a recording session two days ago where I asked an actress who’s playing in our ensemble –- we have more speaking parts in this game than I can keep track of –- if she could have her character hum at one point. So she says yes and yet again I luck out because what comes next is the most beautiful humming I have ever heard in my entire life. Just gorgeous.

BioShock Infinite's universe is sort of like ours, but just a bit different.Image: Irrational Games

Wired: What’s the process of picking out these licensed songs like?

Levine: Well we have an original score being written, similar to BioShock. There’s music that characters hear in the world and then there’s music on the soundtrack that they don’t hear. That’s the authorial music we use to comment on the game.

I actually never really believed in that until I met Garry Schyman, who worked on the original compositions for BioShock and now Infinite. The descent to Rapture would never have been the same without Schyman’s beautiful score.

But one of my favorite parts of my job is choosing the licensed music. BioShock Infinite is set in an interesting time because it’s right at the beginning of jazz and blues. Music before jazz and blues is not very listenable. I mean popular music -– it’s really kind of awful. You know, the John Philip Sousa marches and stuff. And then you get jazz and blues coming in, with the early stuff like ragtime.

It’s much more challenging to find music from that era that sounds great to a modern ear. BioShock was set in 1959, so we had this huge slate of great music to choose from. But here we don’t have all the chord progressions, and the things we like didn’t exist or had just started to exist. So finding music has been a really interesting challenge.

You end up finding stuff like bluegrass and gospel that you can draw from. But there are a lot of hymns that are awful, right? Then you find a melody like “Will The Circle Be Unbroken,” which we used in our trailer and is just beautiful. So you have to dig a little deeper and that means my research has been a little harder this time around.

Generally in first-person shooters, you’re playing a crazy sociopath running around murdering people.

Wired: How strict are you as a creator? Do you say, “No, this game is set in 19-whatever, therefore no song written afterwards can be used?”

Levine: The most important thing is that you get people to feel things. I’ll give you a hint: There weren’t flying cities in 1912 nor were there underwater cities and genetic technology in 1959 (laughs). So, yeah, you play a little fast and loose. You could argue that this is Columbia and we do things a little differently.

You’ve already heard some of the strange musical things in the game. There’s a part where Elizabeth opens these tears to other worlds and realities. She opens up something that appears to be the 1980s and you can hear Tears for Fears playing.

So music is going to have a strange role in this game. Stranger than BioShock, at least. There’s definitely some surprises there.

Wired: I’m getting into dangerous territory here, but is the opening of tears going to be a fun little Easter egg that happens sometimes, or is it going to be integral to where the story goes and is resolved?

Levine: It’s absolutely essential in the story. It’s not a gimmick or anything because that’s what makes Elizabeth special. It’s why everybody’s interested in her and why all these powers are pursuing her. Everyone else can see these tears but they can’t manipulate them.

It’s not gimmicky but you can have a little fun with it, absolutely. Like the moment where we had Revenge of the Jedi displayed on a 1980’s movie theater marquee. Certainly that was a storytelling device. It told you what she was doing in a lot of ways. It told you that it wasn’t just a time-travel thing because obviously there was no Revenge of the Jedi.

There’s a lot packed into that little two-second clip, especially for a nerdy guy like you or me. Figuring that out was a real challenge. I knew I wanted to get that message across but struggled with the execution.

Those are going to be a major element of the game –- both in the gameplay and the story. It’s the heart of the game, that this world has this strange thing going on. The same way that geneticism and Objectivism were the driving forces for the first BioShock.

This notion of physics, this quantum mechanics issue paired with the philosophies of the city make for very interesting things that go on.

Wired: So BioShock, of course, heavily subverted and poked a bit of fun at linear game design. Does Infinite play with the conventional wisdom of design in a similar way?

Levine: You know it’s always interesting when you get into meta-spaces like that where you’re commenting on games. In that case we used the limitations of a game to talk about those same limitations. Because, look, we do a lot of math in our heads as gamers to forgive a lot of the things games do. Generally in first-person shooters, you’re playing a crazy sociopath running around murdering people (laughs).

But you’re a hero, right? How many people does Commander Shepard kill? He literally kills thousands of people. How many people does the protagonist of BioShock Infinite kill? A lot. You still want to deal with him in a human way.

When you shine a light on these sort of things, it can be disconcerting. You’re not just shining a light on the story, you’re shining a light on the player’s experience as a gamer.

Going back to System Shock 2, when we revealed Polito was SHODAN, that was very early in games in terms of messing with the player. It wasn’t an insult to the character, it was an insult to you. What you thought you had was not real. You made all these assumptions that turned out to be wrong.

I think it’s an interesting notion and I think you need to continue to evolve it so you’re not just doing the same thing over and over.